Glacial Errata, No. 17

[Editor’s Note: Thanks to everyone who weighed on their preferred day to receive this newsletter. Monday morning won by a landslide.]

One: Some Stones Are Ancient Books

Last week I came across a small book on the late work of Richard Sharpe Shaver. Entitled Some Stones Are Ancient Books, it consists of Shaver’s documentation of his belief one could identify significant patterns, images, and messages in cross sections of rocks. Shaver made cut open all manner of minerals, looking for shapes and images that he took to be genuine communications that could be easily read and deciphered.

“Unfortunately, sawing a rock book is something like cutting up the Winged Victory to see if the artist put shoulder muscles under the wings,” Shaver wrote. “You may find out, but you destroy the beauty.”

Two: The Shaver Mysteries

Richard Shaver is most well known for his earlier work: in 1943, he began corresponding with Ray Palmer, the editor of the sf mag Amazing Stories—Palmer became intrigued by Shaver’s strange correspondence, including a 10,000 word manuscript “A Warning to Future Man” (that Shaver presented as documentary non-fiction) that humans were controlled by a subterranean race known as Deros, who were responsible for misfortune and suffering. Palmer heavily edited the work and published it as the fictional novella “I Remember Lemuria!,” which became an absolute sensation and launched “The Shaver Mysteries” phenomenon: a series of science fiction stories about this interior world, an epic battle between good and evil, and an entire cosmology all spun from what seems likely to have been one person’s undiagnosed schizophrenia.

Three: Even the Stone’s Hard Mass Is Alive

Returning to Shaver’s rock images reminded me of a work I saw last summer in Oslo by Edvard Munch. Titled “Notes from a Madman/Even the Stone’s Hard Mass Is Alive,” it depicts a head growing out of the side of a rocky mountain, a small village in the distant valley below. (Made in 1930, it’s a near copy of an 1894 image he titled “World’s Are Within Us.”)

Four: Crystallization

With these images, Munch seemed influenced by the notion of “crystallization,” a now-debunked hypothesis advanced by Ernst Haeckel (among others) that all organic life sprang spontaneously at some point in the distant past from inorganic material. As David Brody wrote of Haeckel in Cabinet Magazine some years ago, Haeckel came to believe that evolution “proved that man and nature were not separable, and thus neither were matter and mind. ‘Crystal souls’ inhered in the very minerals we were made of, human intellect being simply their higher expression achieved by means of evolutionary drama.”

Five: Alien Geology

Like Shaver’s belief that one can find simple images and patterns in the random noise of a rock’s cross section, crystallization is yet another attempt to render the alien landscape of geology into something translatable, apprehensible, and usable by humans. Both attempts fail catastrophically, of course, but I’m continually drawn back to both Munch’s drawings and Shaver’s photographs nonetheless—not because I find in them any scientific value, but because, through their failures, they end up making even more transparent how radically alien this geologic world is to us.

We’ll give donni saphire the last word this week.